You cannot force something like this - people either like this place or they do not.

Part of what everyone is waiting for is the tools and the UI/UX to get better. Lemmy is moving forward at a glacial snail’s pace, and while PieFed is zooming ahead by comparison it is also apparent to everyone how “opinionated” the software is. And that severely turns people away who are the main ones keeping communities alive - e.g. PugJesus. A few examples are the recent introduction of the vote quota, the disabling of ability to see downvote counts, and defederation of the lemvotes instance (this one limited to the PieFed.social instance rather than software, but still relevant especially as that is the flagship instance) thereby preventing people from seeing who voted on what content, which otherwise can be done by most every other instance across the entire Threadiverse.

The Threadiverse, and Fediverse too, is dying off, rather than growing. I suggest you make your peace that it is simply going to be this way, for roughly the next half to full decade at least, until the software catches up and until people start focusing on making communities FUN to visit here. Instead, this place is like a ghost town where people either shout their thoughts into the void with barely any reception at all (as your post mentioned), or else the handful of actually active super-communities where all the toxicity is. One reason for that btw is the overall lack of moderation support - e.g. Lemmy will not federate mod reports to people using accounts elsewhere than the same instance the community is located on until it catches up to v1.0, which based on past software upgrades could take something like or even more than a year to become fully deployed across the Threadiverse.

I can give you an irl example of a community dying off in real time: along with m_f who you have discussed with here in this post I help moderate the community !askUSA@discuss.online. There are only 2 main rules: be nice and put political content elsewhere (we even provide specific links to multiple communities that people might want to use in the community side bar). However, after Donald Trump won the last USA Presidential election, virtually nobody - including us as the mods - wants to post to that community, and those very few that do were highly enriched in political content for a long while. We’ve decided to ignore our own rules and leave those few posts up, but even then almost nobody comments or votes. I might literally end up in a concentration camp, sent somewhere in the world that I’ve never so much as visited before, as a result of being here on the Threadiverse, or specifically being connected to that community, if it gets used to agitate leftist fighting against the system.

And other than politics, what else even is there to talk about, regarding specifically the USA, lately?

You cannot force “engagement” (nor should anyone try imho), you can only encourage it. If a place is WELCOMING, then people will eventually come and want to join it. There’s not much else that can be done in the meantime, as we wait for the software to get better - e.g. people report leaving Lemmy due to our toxicity, which relates to the lack of moderation, which relates to the lack of mod reports being allowed to federate, so when that changes… it will allow this space to change, but before that software upgrade gets rolled out it remains an uphill battle, not likely to be won except by the most enormous of efforts and at great cost, far out of proportion to the rewards received for having done so.

The Fediverse is dying, and there isn’t much anyone can do about it, for now. In the short term I recommend using this place as not your sole form of social media - the content simply is not here, and increasingly the amount of content trends downwards rather than upwards (e.g. we are losing PugJesus, and like a year ago we lost FlyingSquid, which are 2 of the 3 top posters we had, making the vast majority of posts across all communities).

You may also want to cross-post this to !strange_activity_investigations@piefed.zip.

I got busy and did not respond sooner, but wanted to say that I think you are correct: it’s not merely the listing of Topics, which e.g. an RSS reader could do, but rather their ranking of those topics that was an enormous part of made Reddit so popular.

Although didn’t some forums offer that functionality, even if not all?

So as you say it’s the Threaded content, ranked by users as to priority order, that people want to see.

This ofc is all justification after the fact for us here - for whatever reason, people decided on that name, whether they should have or not, and I guess now the question is would a better name be worth the pain of switching? :-)

No I did mean up & downvotes, and you added a good perspective. I don’t use Mastodon and my main experience there was Kbin, now Mbin, which has both Boosts and actual upvotes (and reduces, which aren’t shown, and downvotes).

I think you are correct: the voting was always the core behind why people liked Reddit, as compared to others at the time.

Although it seems like people are more adamant about remaining with Threadiverse, for the sake of history.

But if a new term was to be used, it would be good for it to reflect voting. Like Forumverse does, perhaps?

Yeah something is screwy - PieFed.social is most definitely aware of lemy.lol (see this at https://piefed.social/instance/lemy.lol), but the last post it has from your own account seems to be nine months ago, and the second link on that page I linked, to “Posts” yields an error.

Nor does this portion of the conversation appear in this version of the OP (see here, which should have all of these responses below it but they are lacking there).

So apologies, I guess it’s not just the tool, rather the issue is wider than that: either your instance lemy.lol or PieFed.social (or both) are not communicating in the standard manner with one another. Fwiw, PieFed.social seems to have no trouble federating with (any? at least the vast majority?) of other Lemmy instances? But I will leave that to you and rimu to work out:-).

Topicverse sounds kinda nice.

To be fair, people were using Threadiverse before Meta revealed that they were working on their Threads. And now they do not want to switch?

Thank you for your contribution:-).

The word itself sounds nice, but is the least inclusive.

That’s like saying that all of these conversations that we all have are on Lemmy.World? Sure, it’s between 50 and 80% true (users and the most active communities, respectively, including this one we are in now), but it misses a ton of nuance and detail there.

PieFed, Mbin, and now nodebb, with others on the way (flarum, perhaps Sublinks) also exist.

So why call this all “Lemmy”, when that’s only a part - granted, by far the majority portion - of the whole?

Tagging @Snoopy@piefed.social.

This is a great summary of the history of the topic, thank you!:-)

Bc a network of forum boards?

Might be too obvious:-).

Alternatively, The Linux hangout.

I noticed PieFed.social on page 9, and the link is functional, even though next to it the status says “disabled”.

That site doesn’t seem very trustworthy. I wonder if it is measuring how “Lemmy-like” an instance is? Anyway I’ve never heard of that site before, but passing the note to @rimu@piefed.social anyway in case it helps:-).

You are very welcome 😁

Yay Jayne was fairly simplistic. The dude barely had any morality bc he was more animal than man. So in that way he played a “straight man” to Mal’a greater level of complexity? He even gave voice to what many of the others were thinking, including Mal himself, but they had the grace to not say it.

True evil requires a minimum amount of “character” in order to achieve anything at all - great or otherwise. So it’s less like Jayne was “bad” and the government was “good”, and more like Jayne was simplisticly animal-like, while the true evils rose up much higher. With great power comes great responsibility, or whatever.

Jayne is like a wall painting in the background - he’s scenery?

As far as Whedon, I dunno, I like a lot of his works, I don’t like his character. The two aren’t entirely connected in my mind, though perhaps they should be more so, I just don’t know.

On the other hand, wasn’t all of this pretty much happening even while the show was still in production? You mentioned that it had “aged”, so I wasn’t coming at this from a perspective of bad show vs. good show, but from it having been a good show where something external caused its goodness to have tanked. If it had been bad at the start, then we wouldn’t say that it “aged”, just that the show sucked. Which it didn’t… and yet, also… didn’t it always though? That yin and yang seemed to me to have not been so much changed by the passage of time?

Edit: oh, I haven’t heard of whatever has been revealed about the actor who plays Jayne. Maybe that’s what you meant. It might change my own perspective of the show in that case. I would hope not actually… but it might.

I feel like that’s more just human nature, which occurs everywhere.

Also, you still retain the right to say whatever you want… though conversely, why then shouldn’t the other side of every single conversation likewise have the right to opt out of it?

Unfortunately Lemmy does not offer great tools (though PieFed offers many more!) to close the enormous gap between “must federate everything” vs. “defederation, thus no longer federates anything at all”. Like there’s a “user instance block”, which doesn’t actually block instances nor users on them. So if someone doesn’t like something, block it is then, bc the tools themselves offer nothing else. We are somehow more authoritian than even Reddit was over here!? Yeah, bc Reddit at least notifies you when your content is removed, and offers a modmail to communicate about it, plus a removed post remains accessible to anyone with a link, but not so wrt Lemmy, which shows a 404 not found, please try again later message when a post is removed by a mod. Seriously, “try again”?! - why, is the mod going to reconsider for some reason?

But… it is what it is.

So far, mainly from this post bc the poll has such a small sample size, the term that seems vastly preferred is Threadiverse. Bc of its history, and how people have already been calling it that. Sort this post by Hot to see what I mean.

I don’t think Forumverse is “bad”, plus as you say it better represents the new additions of nodebb and flarum. Although that term would be swimming against the tide of people that have been using Threadiverse all this time and seem to not want to switch (possibly bc I did not explain the situation well, especially the clarification about the term Fediverse already existing, and now how the situation is a bit different wrt nodebb and flarum).

Ofc this is all just on a Sunday -> there is still lots of room for things to happen in the next coming days, to see how these results may shift:-).

Thank you for weighing in, this is quite helpful! 🙏

I think one of the major tropes present in the show was to demonstrate how there aren’t simply white hats vs. black hats (to use cowboy terms). Mal is a criminal, “forced” into living that way bc the government won’t “allow” him to live legitimately (except… really? Why won’t they again?). Therefore, the presence of great darkness within his lightness, or as you might prefer the presence of occasional boughts of lightness within his darkness, is not a “bug”, it’s a “feature” of the show, to walk out that yin and yang in a fantasy space opera setting.

Nobody is perfect. Some are far less so than others. Those at least tend to be aware of their imperfections, as opposed to e.g. The Galactic Empire muwhahaha, ahem cough, anyways they seem so stolid, so absolutely certain of their moral righteousness, that unlike the criminal Mal who often isn’t such a bad guy once you get to know him, commits atrocities the likes of which would turn people’s stomachs, if they knew (hence those are kept as closely guarded secrets).

So I think you missed that: from the perspective of the show, that was no accident - that was literally the entire point of what they were attempting to convey. Mal was not a “good guy”. He just had light in his darkness, the same way that the empire has darkness in its light (or is it rather the other way around?).

B-b-but Lemmy isn’t known for aggressive, opinionated users, i-i-is it!? :-P

That works for Lemmy + K/Mbin.

But now with +PieFed, +nodebb, and soon +flarum, and perhaps +Sublinks, Lemmyville doesn’t seem very inclusive?

I already started this as a poll about post flairs, neither of which features is nor is expected to appear on Lemmy very soon iirc. The rest of the Fediverse isn’t waiting around for coders to learn Rust and eventually getting around to adding features to Lemmyville.

So Lemmy in particular may want to not start being exclusive! It will get left behind if it does!